


The importance of being eleven-years-old

by Hbfan26



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Episode: s04e01 The Dead of Winter, Gen, Missing Scene, Zalinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24040456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hbfan26/pseuds/Hbfan26
Summary: The Zalinski (Zelinsky?) case and its affect on James Hathaway. Set just before the court case scene in s4 ep1 Dead of Winter. Nothing graphic is described.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 55





	1. Hathaway

  1. **Hathaway**



In his dreams all he can hear is a steady drip…...drip……drip……drip…...

The sound of an overflow pipe dripping water through a hole in the top of a water tank in the attic of a very respectable suburban home. One of the nicest areas of Oxford in fact, and Oxford seems to have plenty of ‘nice’ areas.

drip……

drip……

drip......

It’s not a loud noise, not something that would keep the occupants of the house or even the neighbours awake at night. You cannot hear it unless you are in the attic, not unless you are right beside the water tank.

drip……

drip…...

drip…… 

It took them three days to figure it out.

Three days of frantic searching and questioning, three days of frustration after frustration, of pointless interviews with suspects who were too afraid or too stupid to help. Three days of chasing leads down blind alleyways, of theorising and arguments, of too much coffee and too many cigarettes and too little sleep.

Which could be any of their cases really. But this was different because this was a child. A ten-year-old girl who had been given permission by her cautious and loving parents to go the shops 4 doors down from her house alone for the first time because she had begged and begged, because all her friends were allowed and why couldn’t she?

_{“But I’m nearly 11”}_

An almost eleven-year-old girl who had gone missing just after lunchtime on a very ordinary Saturday in one of the ‘nicest’ areas of Oxford. An almost eleven-year-old girl whose parents had frantically searched and searched for her, ringing the police and everyone they knew to help. Good parents. Ordinary hard-working good parents with no skeletons in their closet and no secrets to hide and who had done nothing wrong, who knew like every parent that at some point they would need to start their daughter off on the road to independence.

drip……

drip……

drip……

Immediately afterwards it was in his head all the time, that noise, but it was loudest at night, whether lying in bed awake or asleep in dreaming. That noise and the sound of his own heart as he opened the lid of the water tank and everything stopped.

drip……

drip….

After a time, it had quieted away. Work, new murders, new suspects, beers and Chinese takeaway in his Inspectors living room, unspoken conversations, invisible arms holding _his_ head above water while never saying a word, never having to.

It helped. They all helped it to fade away.

Three days out from the court case the sound came back. Softly at first, a faded background noise, He checked every tap to make sure they were properly off. They were and he knew they would be. That night he lay awake, his eyes shut, trying to concentrate on something, anything but the sound in his head.

drip……

drip……

drip……

Then came the dream, and when he awoke the next morning he could feel his heart and his stomach and his mind hollowed out again, like a vacuum filling up with white noise and water and all he could think about was her. That they were too late. That they should have worked faster, understood quicker, gotten angrier and pushed for answers. That they had failed. That an almost eleven-year-old would never be an actual eleven-year-old.

drip……

drip……

drip……

Peter Zalinski was a friend of the family. Not a close friend. Not someone who called around for coffee or played golf with the dad, not like that. They had met at a drinks party one Christmas; he was an architect and had called to the house shortly after to advise them on an extension they were planning. He was polite and friendly, married with 3 girls of his own _{“I never touched my girls, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t touch my girls ever”}_ He had overseen the project and charged them a very reasonable fee and they had shared a bottle of wine to celebrate when the builders finally left. Sitting in the breakfast bar with dust and unpainted walls everywhere.

She must have been there too, maybe playing in the garden, maybe watching something on TV. She knew him, but maybe never warmed to him like she did with some of Mummy and Daddy’s other friends. Children have better instincts and are less inclined to talk themselves out of believing them. Even ten-year-olds aspiring to be independent eleven-year-olds.

drip……

drip……

drip……

The night before the trial the noise becomes so loud, and so incessant and the dream is so real that when he wakes up its all he can hear is that noise. Climbing into the attic he had known straightaway it was wrong. That _drip…drip…drip_ wasn’t the sound of water dripping onto water. There is a subtle difference and anyhow, he’s a good detective. 

He thought he would be able for it, would be able to handle whatever was under that lid because that was his job. He’s found bodies before, he’s seen people, people he was close to even, lying dead in front of him. But they weren’t a ten (almost eleven) year-old-girl lying naked in a freezing cold-water tank at the top of a very ordinary detached house in a ‘nice’ part of Oxford. They weren’t an almost eleven-year-old girl who had gone to the shop with a five pound note to spend _{“Get some milk, and biscuits for tea, you choose what ones”}_ and who instead had been swept off the street and raped and killed while three girls played in their next door neighbours garden.

drip……

drip……

drip……

Brown, shoulder length curly hair and brown eyes. Big brown eyes that stare blankly up at him as he holds her head out of the water and desperately tries CPR even though he knows she is dead, knows she has been there for some time, knows it no good. And all the time he’s desperately waiting for the sound of a cough or a splutter or a breath and all he can here is that bloody dripping pipe and its not rational but its like the pipe is the thing that killed her. Like she would have been okay if that pipe hadn’t kept dripping water in on top of her.

drip……

drip……

drip……

He knows the evils that people are capable of, more than he had ever realised, more than he had ever wanted to know. In the Seminary they talked good and evil all the time, but theoretical evil is much easier to understand, to justify, to accept. Real evil is painful and hard. It hits you across the chest and makes it hard to breathe, it punches you in the face so that your eyes close and fill with tears, your brain trying to find alternative answers, trying and failing to process that what is right in front of you has actually happened, is actually real. You can’t debate real evil, can’t understand it or justify it or look for reasons why it happened and how it could have been avoided.

Sometimes its just an almost eleven-year-old girl who did nothing wrong and is lying dead in his arms, her head being kept above water even though she’s clearly dead because he cannot bear to let her fall back into that cold water and cannot move the body until someone _{Laura}_ comes.

drip……

drip……

drip……

And now it’s the day of the trial he’s standing here beside Detective Inspector Lewis, waiting to be called, waiting to face the man who denied everything, who wouldn’t even have the common decency to confess. And the noise and the _drip, drip, drip_ won’t stop, and now there’s other noises alongside it, a _whoosh_ as he lifts her head out of the water, the sound of his breath entering her body, the gentle lapping of the water in the cistern, the sound of the voice in his head shouting “ _NO! NO! NO!”_ and they are getting louder and louder and louder and ….

“Detective Sergeant Hathaway?” An ordinary noise, the sound of a court clerk calling his name.

And just like his head is a little quieter. When Lewis asks him if he’s “ _Alright?”_ he says yes, because even though he’s not and maybe he never will, maybe the noise and the girl and the water will never really go away. But he can do his job, this time he can get it right, he can stand up and talk about what he saw and make sure that the next almost-eleven-year-old can run home, excited to have bought her favourite chocolate biscuits and to tell her Mummy and Daddy all about the first time she want to the shop alone.

Any maybe someday he can say all this out loud to someone and the sounds will fade away forever.

Maybe.


	2. Lewis

**Lewis**

Lewis rarely dreams. Not anymore.

In the beginning, after Val, he had the same nightmare over and over again. He was standing and looking on as her car crashed, helpless to do anything, watching as his Val was tumbled over and over and over in her car, body thrown about despite the seatbelt, blood and glass and screams, the car and Val were coming towards him, rolling over and over, coming to take him too…

He’d always wake up just before the car hit him. In the beginning he was angry, angry that car didn’t keep going and take him too, because what was the point without Val. Then his anger would fade to be replaced by guilt at the idea of leaving his kids without a Dad as well as a Mam, at his selfishness at wanting to go too.

Overtime the dream faded, and his desire to be hit by the speeding hurtling car faded too. But not quickly. Moving halfway across the world had helped, or at least he thought it had helped. 

The first night he came home from BVI, he lay in bed for hours, terrified to sleep in case the dream came back, in case he saw his Val like that again, broken and covered in blood and screaming. When he finally fell asleep he dreamed instead of the first time he had taken Mark fishing, and of having to fish the boy out of the side of the river where he tumbled in in his excitement at trying to land his first catch. It was shallow where he’d gone in, Lewis knew the boy would be okay, had chosen that spot deliberately and the boy was a good swimmer. But Val had been furious because all she could see was a wet, cold 10-year-old boy who could easily have drowned.

He’d had the same dream two nights previously and had woken up and wondered what brought it back into his mind, then remembered.

Zalinski.

Two day until the trial, and that meant two more days of pretending not to notice as his sergeant unwound before his eyes, two days of nail biting and blank stares and sharp responses followed by mumbled apologies. Two days of doing all he could to help by not doing or saying anything because he knew James Hathaway and he knew that if he pushed too hard, if he pushed at all, that James would lose his temper and say something he might well regret later, something really hurtful. And while Robbie Lewis could take it, could understand the lad was just lashing out, pushing up those defensive walls he seemed to cling onto so tightly all his life, he knew his sergeant would fade a little more under the weight of his remorse.

So instead he pushed them both harder to close their latest case, he deliberately misquoted Keats ( _Angry stare replacing blank stare, that was something)_ and made his Sergeant do all the driving and most of the legwork. Distraction, that’s what the lad needed. Maybe it was what they both needed.

Cases involving children never got any easier really, and he had unfortunately seen his fair share of them. As a copper on the beat and with Morse, children who had been abused and neglected, caught up in things beyond their age, used as pawns by adults for their own gain. It took your breath away each time and each of them stayed with you somehow, occupied a corner of your heart that was kept just for them, somewhere to protect their memories at least, so keep them safe.

They found their man, or what was left of him the day before the trial. It hadn’t been particularly satisfying, one of those cases where everything feels very unresolved despite the case having been closed. One of those cases where you questioned the point of being a copper.

He left their shared office just after 7pm. “ _I’m off Sergeant, I’ll collect you at 8 o’clock in the morning”_

It wasn’t a question and didn’t require a response. No angry stare this time either. Maybe relief at not being asked to go for a pint, at not being distracted, at not hearing words of advice (always sound, solid words of advice, Robbie Lewis didn’t do platitudes). If he was honest with himself maybe Robbie was relieved too.

He slept badly that night, tossing and turning until we eventually gave up at 5am and got out of bed to make some tea. He drank it sitting at the kitchen table, idly flicking through and old newspaper lying on the table but not actually reading anything.

He tried not to dwell on the ‘bad’ cases too much and he didn’t talk much about them either. Some coppers did, manys a time one of his colleagues had sought him out in the pub to tell him about a really awful case, and he had sat there and listened, even when he was tired and really would rather be at home because he knew they needed to talk, to get it off their system. he had talked to Val, when it was really bad, and he felt he could see blood everywhere he looked. But mainly he accepted the sadness, kept some of it and pushed a lot to one side, distracted himself.

Maybe it was learnt behaviour from Morse. Maybe he was passing it onto the lad. Probably not though. James Hathaway was introspective and silent ( _and sad_ ) long before he met Robert Lewis.

But as much as he tried to coax James Hathaway out of his melancholy, he had to admit to himself that a part of that little girl had stayed with him ever since too. His sergeant had sometimes challenged Robbie Lewis about his lack of faith but with cases like this he became even more convinced than ever that there was no such thing as god, or fate or destiny. It was just an evil person doing grotesque evil things. Zalinski was evil. He had torn that family apart, he had taken the life of a bright, inquisitive bubbly ten-year-old girl, had snatched it away for his own perverted twisted pleasure.

Maybe it was the circumstances of the case that really got to him, no motive, no connection, no sad backstory, no abuse, no sadness, nothing. Or maybe it was the sight of his sergeant kneeling as in prayer over an open water tank in the attic of a house in ‘one of the nicest’ parts of Oxford. Maybe it was the way Hatchway’s hands held the girl, cradling her head, keeping it out of the water, holding her so gently although no life remained.

When Lewis got to the house he had found a PC nervously standing at the bottom of the attic ladder, unsure of what to do next, half afraid of the silent, angry, blond haired detective who had barked orders at him to ring Laura Hobson and Inspector Lewis and then told him to stand at the bottom of the ladder and _“Let NO-ONE else up, do you hear?”_

Preserving her dignity, not letting anyone else touch or see her like this. Lewis understood. And now he stood at the top of the ladder, waiting for Laura Hobson and SOCO to arrive, watching over them both.

Keeping Guard.

  
THE END

**Author's Note:**

> I REALLY wanted to 'have a go' at the Zalinksi (Zelinsky?) case but I've ended up with more of a stream of consciousness piece from James point of view when i was aiming for more of a case file. However... it is what it is (as another famous detective said!). Chapter 2 from Lewis point of view now added.


End file.
